Blood, Bones & Butter - By Gabrielle Hamilton Page 0,89

splits and stacks the wood by herself. If a bat flies in she chases it out. She is holding her socks up with rubber bands but she has her living will, her health-care proxy, and her estate and final years totally taken care of in a way that will never saddle her children with awkward and difficult decisions. And now, in the daylight, we go through the wines that Michele packed and the hard-to-find Asian ingredients that I packed, and we spend the morning talking, neutrally, about food and wine. It is unclear if either of us is going to mention the past twenty years. I am prepared to skip it because that’s not why I’ve come. She seems just as inclined. So we discuss the best way to store and cook Vietnamese rice stick. I see pinned above her little desk a cartoon torn from the New Yorker, in which a piece of rigatoni pasta answers the phone and exclaims, “Fusilli, you crazy bastard, how the hell have you been?!” and she and I laugh solidly three minutes over that one. Even Michele joins in.

She speaks a little Italian that she has learned over the years to Michele but he answers in English, so mostly she goes on in an English heavily peppered with French. My mom grew up in a French-speaking home and spoke French to her parents until the days they died. Michele tries to answer her in the little French he knows but in an Italian accent so thick, he is just impossible to understand. I recognize this simply as the need that two people in a room who speak more than one language always seem to have—they need to demonstrate their ability to speak more than one language—but somehow it makes me want to inch back a little further toward the deepest wall of my mental shed while this little patch of rain falls. I am drawn to Marco’s simplicity. He just needs to eat and sleep.

“Well, Pruney, how do you use this jar of Asian soup paste?” She is squinting at it, perplexed.

It seems odd to be showing my mother a jar of tom yum paste and explaining its potential in soup and noodle dishes when she is the woman who taught me everything I know, pretty much, about eating, cooking, and cleaning. But she seems to be doing what everybody does when they age—becoming incrementally less and less competent. I expect this with her in terms of technology—the stunning rigamarole around an answering machine and cordless phone in the 1980s made it exceptionally clear that she was not going to join us in the computer age. But I am kind of taken aback by this confusion with the food.

And now it’s me who’s staring at her sternly, like she’s an imbecile, much as she looked at me when I was ten, trying to understand what she was saying about slicing a corned beef across the grain. I remember being baffled by what the “grain” of a hunk of meat meant, but she was relentless in her expectation and unyielding in an explanation and so I figured it out in spite of her menacing gaze. And I began slicing clean thin planks of corned beef by sawing back and forth across the grain and noticing how it stopped shredding now that I had turned the meat. But I just cannot believe she doesn’t know how to stir a little paste into chicken stock or coconut milk or both. Is it possible that I now know more than she does about food and cooking? Have I surpassed her?

I consider for a moment that it’s the “foreign” part of the jar that defies her. But this is the most sophisticated, snobbish woman in the world. Traveled. Exposed. She regularly read the New York Times and the New Yorker. Listened exclusively to classical music in our house. Danced in the corps of The New York City Ballet. Saw Ballanchine in the corridors. Blew past the overweight tourists in our town as they trudged along the cobblestones in their white sneakers enjoying the quaint “historical” markers and the gas lanterns while licking ice-cream cones, and she’d snarl out the window of her antique Benz, “Gros cochon.” She gave us all Champagne at Christmas and taught us to flip the savoiarde ladyfinger biscuits from the edge of the table up high into the air and have them land—with a festive splash—in the flute. This same woman unable to navigate